Teach Secondary - Issue 14.6

Why teach GRAMMAR? Does teaching students what various language components and tools are called actually do anything to improve their command of the written word? Bhamika Bhudia unpacks the arguments for and against… T he efficacy of reintroducing explicit grammar teaching to the National Curriculum in 2014 still remains a hotly debated topic among many secondary school teachers, even over a decade later. Following a series of reforms overseen by then Education SecretaryMichael Gove, the National Curriculumhas since stated that students, “ Should be taught the correct use of grammar. They should build on what they have been taught to expand the range of their writing and the variety of the grammar they use ”. This is fine, in theory – but teaching grammar in this way fell out of fashion in the UK in the 70s and 80s, after a US study found that it made no difference in writing skills. This means that not only has the education system returned to an approach deemed futile for mainstreamBritish education decades ago, but that a large proportion of those expected to implement it now have never had any experience of such instruction during their own time at school. The study of grammar has, nonetheless, become embedded in the primary sector, and largely been a constant fixture in grammar and private schools. Many mainstream secondary teachers, however – even English specialists – have openly spoken about their insecurities with teaching grammar, given its comparative absence from their own learning. All while at the same time needing to teach two GCSEs’ worth of content at KS4, and simultaneously ensure that the KS3 curriculumhas depth, breadth, diversity and challenge. Evolving standards Adding to the contention further is the fact that, like the English language itself, the rules of grammar and what’s deemed as ‘proper’ and ‘accurate’ have evolved over time. For example, the age-old faux pas of splitting infinitives – such as ‘to boldly go’ wouldn’t have been acceptable in earlier teachings. Yet writing such as this, by today’s standards, is not just perfectly acceptable, but also allows for exploration, and playing with sentence construction and description in a creative and meaningful way. Ending a sentence with a preposition – ‘ He couldn’t find a chair to sit in ’ – would once have been considered ugly and sloppy. But again, today, it wouldn’t cause anyone to bat an eyelid. Nor would the use of ‘ will ’, instead of its more formal counterpart ‘ shall ’. Teaching a system that’s constantly changing in ways considered obsolete by today’s standards begs the question of whether this approach is merely a forced and antiquated return to what was, at one time, considered ‘the proper way’ to do things. What the evidence says More than a decade on from those Gove-ian reforms, the research evidence is again pointing in the same direction. A 2022 study by UCL and The Nuffield Foundation, which tested the effects of explicit grammar teaching on primary students, found that it had “ Effectively no impact on pupils’ narrative writing…This is consistent with previous studies in the field of “It’s not necessarily the teachingofgrammar that’s meaningless, somuchas the way it’s implemented” 62 teachwire.net/secondary